Girl Walks Into a Bar (20 page)

I’m sure she would say she was making a joke out of nervousness, but I think part of her was truly afraid I might show up at their doorstep and hand the baby off to them, Maury Povich—style, saying, “Sorry, guys, but I gots ta party.”

She did get up and hug me, and I
think
she looked happy. She got a little teary even. About a month later, she would send me a bunch of maternity clothes from T.J. Maxx, confirming their support and also reminding me that having a baby to bargain-shop for might be my mother’s greatest joy. But at the time, though they said they would support me, I left there that day feeling like Juno. A forty-three-year-old Juno.

After I told
good friends and the parents I was pregnant, I then entered the phase where I had to tell people I didn’t know as well. This was not quite as fun. People would assume I was
trying to get pregnant or they’d ask, “Were you using birth control?” (Yes, they did get that personal.) The answer is, I was not trying to get pregnant and I was using what I thought would be fine for birth control given the onslaught of “It’ll never happen” news that had already taken over my brain. I can tell you this: You know those warnings they give you in junior high school health class about how the withdrawal method is not a reliable method of contraception and can still result in pregnancy? Well, now I know firsthand, they weren’t just whistlin’ Dixie. They meant it!

During what I thought of as my fertile years, I was conscientious, never being careless about birth control whatsoever. But I was pushing forty-four by the time John and I got together. In addition, John’s last relationship had been with a woman my age, so he was already quite versed in the over-forty fertility realities. I have several dear friends of similar age who were married and trying to conceive and were having to rely on medical intervention: Clomid or IVF. And I had been told by my doctor that early menopause is often hereditary and could negatively affect my fertility.

With all of these elements, why would I think I could ever get pregnant, especially with my high school birth control methods thrown in for good measure? Look at it this way: If you were ever advising someone on how to get pregnant, would you ever say, “Wait until you are two months shy of your forty-fourth birthday, don’t pay any attention to your cycle and the forty-eight hours when you could become pregnant, and, shall we say, withdraw before completing the act? Good luck!”?

I was astounded by what happened. It changed my way of
thinking, because I had fully bought into my own negative future about having a child. No one could have budged me on that. I found the most receptive audience to my story were the single women in their late thirties and early forties, like me, who were used to hearing that motherhood at their age was a difficult if not impossible feat. I was a tiny beacon of hope (or in my case, a bacon of hope) for any one of them who thought they still might want children at some point—one real story to go against the barrage of news reports, magazine articles, advice, and sob stories to the contrary. I knew better than anyone that not everyone is lucky enough to find love during their “safety” years and that not every woman is cut out to say, “Whatever. I’m doing it alone.”

As opposed to the awe I was eliciting from the single ladies, I noticed a vastly different response when I told women my age with kids who’d been married for many years. “Were you using birth control?” When I’d tell them the honest answer, they would laugh at me! They downright scolded me as if I were a teenager! “Rachel! That’s HIGH SCHOOL stuff!” a woman whom I do not know well enough to have been sharing my personal information said to me. To which I could have replied, “Oh yeah?! Well, I wasn’t having sex in high school!” I always got a bit angry when I heard this “duh” reaction, because of course a married woman who had her kids
right on schedule
has never really taken in and
felt
the barrage of “YOU BETTER HAVE KIDS BEFORE FORTTYYYYYY OR YOU MAY HAVE FERTILITY ISSUUUUUES!” news stories and magazine articles and general conversations that a single woman who may still want kids hears and pays attention to and has to contend
with on a regular basis. Also, I always thought all the warnings they give to teens about not relying on the withdrawal method was just some bullshit you told high school kids who had no control of their bodies. I honestly didn’t think people really got pregnant that way. Yes, I did purport earlier that I was in the “smart” classes.

I’ve Got Spirit!

During the pregnancy
, I felt quite sure the baby would make it to full term. The disadvantage of being of “advanced maternal age” is that you do have a higher chance of miscarriage. However, I felt I would be having this baby, because I realized I had been told just that by Shelley the Channeler not quite one year ago.

I know that reading all these stories about pigs and dreams and The Secret might make the reader think I am super-into the metaphysical and really New Age-y. I’m definitely open to that stuff, but I don’t think of myself as airy-fairy. I feel more like I started to notice the strange phenomena around me rather than be closed off to them. This whole ball got rolling in a sense when my friend Josan took me to see Shelley the Channeler on my birthday a few months before I met John. Josan herself is psychic—not for a living, not for money, but it’s just a gift she has. So that year on my birthday, I was in LA, and Josan picked me up for a birthday lunch and told me afterward,
“We are going to see my friend Shelley the Channeler.” “OK,” I said, “bring it on!”

We arrived at her house in Rancho Palos Verdes and I met Shelley—a woman of about sixty with a slight Midwestern twang. Or, I don’t know, maybe she was a lifelong mellow Californian. But she didn’t greet us drenched in crystals or dreamcatchers or anything like that.

Shelley channels a spirit named Kendra. So you sit on her couch and she does this sort of blessing thing and then her head pops up and she has become Kendra. Kendra speaks with an accent akin to an Indian accent and her eyes are bright and girlish and her voice is chirpy like a bird’s.

“Hello! How are you?”

I couldn’t help but giggle a bit self-consciously.

“Um. I’m fine.”

“Good!” says Kendra. “I’m very glad you are here to see me!”

Kendra starts talking to me about who I am, who my family is to me, what I worry about, what my strengths are, and it was all spot-on. Instantly. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could find through Google. It was like she knew my emotions, my concerns, anxieties, not facts and external things about me. She wouldn’t say, “Now, do you have a brother?” trying to feel out my situation. She would definitively say, “Your brother is experiencing this or that.” So I’m already instantly impressed.

Also, side story here—I had done a visioning workshop once in California. OK, now it’s really hard to believe I’m not into all this stuff, but just go with me here. We were supposed to imagine our spirit guide taking us on a journey. Everyone in
the workshop seemed to be able to imagine a spirit guide, a specific person they had never met, with a face they could see, that would lead them on this journey. Try as I might, I could not envision a spirit guide. Every time the leader mentioned the guide, I had to confess to myself that this vision just wasn’t happening for me. Instead, I kept envisioning a blue dot. About the height of a person, my spirit guide looked not unlike a large, blue, iridescent M&M. But I referred to it as the Blue Dot—not the Blue Circle or the Blue Orb—the Blue Dot. I would joke with the other participants during the breaks, because I had shared with a few of them that I couldn’t see a person, so every time the leader would say, “Your spirit guide takes you by the hand” or “Your spirit guide takes you into their arms,” I’d think, “My guide doesn’t have arms! It’s just a blue M&M!”

This workshop had taken place several years ago. I hadn’t thought of it or the Blue Dot in a long time. As I was sitting on the couch and listening to Kendra the Spirit talking to me, she said, “You are guided by the spirit of the Blue Dot.”

In the tradition of the Great Writers who have gone before me, I will now call upon the phrase “I shit you not.”

Kendra did make a few predictions for me. She said, “You are going to meet a man in three months. No, wait, six months—in three to six months.”

By now, I hadn’t dated anyone seriously for five years, so this seemed too good to be true.

“What should I do to meet him?” I asked. I was thinking, “Does this mean I have to go on
Match.com
?”

“You won’t have to
do
anything. Also, you are going to have one child.”

I was highly skeptical of this prediction. Sure, that would be lovely if it were true. I would like to believe. But did this spirit from India or somewhere that had an accent that sounded mildly Indian realize that I was turning forty-three at the time and I was completely single? Having a child would mean defying some major odds. It would have to be some sort of miracle at this point. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to offend Kendra. I nodded politely.

Four months later, I met John in the bar. I didn’t have to
do
anything. He just started talking to me. And a little less than a year after Kendra told me, I learned I would be having a baby. The whole time in that iffy stage of the first trimester, even when I was thinking, “Well, you never know, this might not ‘take’ due to my age and the chance of miscarriage,” Kendra’s words were in the back of my head. I didn’t even tell John about Kendra, but I had a feeling of “Oh, this is going to happen,” because Kendra the Vaguely Indian Spirit had told me I was going to have one child.

What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting

I open the book
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, sent to me by a dear friend from home. The first line is “So you’ve made the decision to start a family….” In my mind, that sentence became “So you’ve made the highly premeditated decision to start a family. You and your HUSBAND have been planning and anticipating this for years. It’s finally time! The glorious miracle of life is within you, and you are aglow with excitement and anticipation.” My brain goes blank. Where’s the book that starts out “So you’re forty-three and think you can’t have kids but unexpectedly got pregnant on a trip to Hawaii with a guy you’ve known for six months who you think is a good guy but the two of you aren’t even close to any sort of commitment?” Where is
that
book?

After San Francisco, John showed signs that he would be supportive in some fashion, though I didn’t know to what
extent. I remember he sent me a big gift certificate for maternity clothes that made me feel like he wasn’t going to run away or not show up. I think that made my parents think he was a good guy as well. They still had yet to meet him. He ended up visiting me about once a month or so and was helping me out when he was here, but because he lived in California, I went to most all of my doctor’s appointments solo. I honestly didn’t mind, though. I had many friends offer to accompany me, especially to the amnio appointment, but I declined. I like braving the doctor’s by myself, and if I have someone there with a concerned look on their face, saying, “Are you okaaay?” it can take me out of my strong zone. I did have my friend David, one of the Dartmouth Gays, accompany me to the genetic counseling session, because I wanted a second person there to think up questions I might have forgotten and to help me remember everything after it was over. I went ahead with the amnio, and everything—all those “advanced maternal age” problems the doctors look for—checked out OK.

I tried checking one of those week-by-week pregnancy Web sites. Here’s what it said:

YOUR PREGNANCY: WEEK 22

If your list of baby things to do seems to be getting longer the bigger you get, don’t stress out. Make a pact with your partner that one day or evening a week, you’ll do something that has nothing to do with the baby. How about the latest Anne Hathaway flick and dinner?